MEDI 111

This is the blog that I’m using for my another class which is a business course.

Here is a funny video to share!

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a strategy of an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. So, the main function of affiliate marketing is to use a website to drive traffic to another one. Also, affiliate marketing often play a significant role in e-retailers’ marketing strategies. In another word, affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing venture between a website owner and an online merchant. The website owner will place advertisements on his websites to either help sell the merchant’s products or to send potential customers to the merchant’s website, all in exchange for a share of the profits. There are three ways to earn profit through affiliate marketing which are “pay per click”, “pay per sale”, and “pay per lead”. These methods help divide between the percentages of profit earned by each customer interact with the affiliate site. There is an interesting blog recommend the 10 sexy affiliate marketing sites that are popular if you read the SEO blog often, yet it provides many insights to think of. Click here to find out more. However, profit is always the issue, so here are some tips for the marketers when they try to do establish affiliate marketing. First, use social networking sites to get targeted traffic to your site. You have to use all these free web sites to create a list also. Secondly, use article writing techniques to get massive amounts of traffic. Thirdly, use video sites to get great results like Youtube and Google videos and promote the affiliate product. Click here for more info. So, by following the tips above, marketers could just spend pennies and earn much more from it without putting too much investment into the program.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing refers to doing marketing promotion with mobile devices such as cellular phone, PDA, or Mp3 player. Marketing on a mobile phone has become increasingly popular ever since the rise of short message service in the early 2000s when businesses started to collect mobile phone numbers and send off wanted or unwanted content. So, since the mobile marketing is still not a mature marketing technique for many marketers, some researches have shown that there are several difficulties and challenges appearing to be the obstacles for the mobile marketing’s future. For examples like “Mobile marketers will send spam-like messages to consumers’ phones without getting permission to do so, mobile spam will be much more annoying than all of that email and blog spam.” So, marketers have to be caution about the use of mobile marketing and counter the downsides of it. One of the most important aspects of successful mobile marketing is keeping it well targeted, and integrating into something the targeted audience actually wants to use. Because incorporating subtle mobile advertising into mobile applications, the user gets what they want while the advertiser gets an opportunity to monetize without upsetting the end-user. This type of mobile marketing is often appearing on Facebook, and iPhone applications. “A recent forecast by Magna Global predicts that mobile media will be one of the fastest growing of the emerging media channels, estimating it to grow by 43% to approximately $300 million in 2009.” In recent years, many large organizations started to invest into mobile marketing like Apple, Goolgle, and Microsoft. There are five tips available for marketers to plan their mobile strategy. “1.Brand image campaigns 2.Integration is key 3.Local rules 4.Get mobile search ready 5.Mobile music, ringtones and gaming will thrive on ad sponsorship” Click here for more detail info. Overall, mobile devices have become lifestyle products, and marketers who successfully attract the customers surely will also grab the most market share.

Geo-Targeting

Geo targeting is a method that marketers use often in internet marketing which determining the geolocation of a website visitor and delivering different customizing content to that visitor based on his or her location, such as country, region/state, city, or Internet Protocol address and so on. This technique is getting more popular and now the Yahoo has just launched a geo-targeting system as well that would enable the search ad campaign managers to fine tune their target audience for a particular advertising campaign. As a result, advertisers would get relevant clicks for their ads. This will automatically increase the sales due to their advertising campaigns has reached their intended audiences effectively. Click here for more info. In some searches, geotargeting is the ability to target an individual’s actual physical location. For example, a person lived in L.A. is searching for “auto dealer” that could be shown links to restaurants only in that location. Because the person typed the location into the search engine, the information will show up specifically in that region. “Research conducted by Yahoo! and comScore in July 2007 pointed to 89% of in-store buyers first researching their purchases online.”  This research demonstrates that there is a need for search marketers to ensure that their products or services are appearing in the places where they could expose their presence. As the online measurement and targeting technologies are developing and getting popular, the opportunities for delivering content and advertisements tailored to designate website user geographically. Generally, geo targeting provides internet marketing specifically for small business, so marketers can reach the right customers in the right market segments with their marketing messages that are highly customizing. For instance, “advertising, promotion, and distribution all require knowing exactly the customer’s location and how it influences the customer’s buying decisions.” Therefore, in the online world, marketers have to target their advertising campaigns and promotional ideas into a local or regional customer base in order to achieve the maximum effectiveness.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is a form of Internet marketing and its major function is to promote websites by increasing their visibility which shows in search engine result pages. Many professional organizations of search engine marketing use the method called search engine optimization to help their clients to achieve better search engine results. “Search Engines outperform all other media in driving visitors to websites with 85% of Internet users citing search engines as the primary method to find websites”. Moreover, the benefit of search engine marketing is to be able to attract people from search engines which are the most effective marketing method. For marketers’ perspective, most of the users don’t look further than the first 2 pages of search results. Most people rather use another search engine than click past over to the first 10 results. Also many users believe that companies found in the top search results are the major brands in their specific product/service category. So, marketers have to be aware that search engine marketing could bring up significant volume of customers to their web sites. There are also some tips for search engine marketing such as: “Web site should be about something you are an expert on, a good site plan should be thought out before you begin marketing, and scope out the competition to see how competitive your keyword landscape is…”. However, one of the main targets is to do the link building. Link building is one of the single most important parts of the SEO processes. Research also suggested that every component of the search engine marketing strategy can be measured. For example, “with your pay per click program, you can compare the total cost of clicks, on a given keyword, at a given cost per click, against the sales that result from those clicks”.  Adjustments can also be made to the pay per click program to continually optimize the results. Of course, when you need to justify your marketing expenditures, search engine marketing helps to provide more detailed tracking information.

Video Marketing

Video marketing is one of the key business differentiators for web marketers that wanting to communicate effectively their products and services in the shortest possible time. Video seems to be a quick and powerful type of tool in turns of transporting information and promoting product. To be specifically enough, there are three types of video marketing which are Video Direct-Mail: sending the video directly to targeted costumers, Video Direct-Response: sending the video to people who request it after seeing the promotion video you offer in another media, and Video Premium: offering a video for free or at a discount in order to stimulate people to purchase. Click here for more info. YouTube has becoming successfully in video marketing area because it having already served up “over 1.73 billion video views and 45 terabytes of video footage to the world”. In nowadays, YouTube is everyone’s first choice when they want to search for any kind of online video. Even though it might not provide the best featured or the best quality service, it is still popular among users, probably due to the easy usability. It is important for any blogger, marketer, or any other online publisher to gain advertising advantages by expose their business on YouTube. One of the advantages of using video marketing is that if you chose the videos well you will notice that people stay on your website longer, because you offer them entertainment. While we associate reading more with educating ourselves and finding information, watching a video feels more like entertainment. In order to attract traffic to your video on YouTube, you can consider the following tips: Choose share videos as an option, post on bulletin boards, Invite viewers to subscribe, Add friends to your video, use the video which appeals to the community, and sharing videos with email. Click here for more details.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is usually refer to a marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks like forums or blogs to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve product or service sales through self-replicating viral processes just like virus. This technique sometimes can be called word-of-mouth marketing which delivered by the network effects from the Internet. The reason that viral marketing is successful is because people voluntarily help passing a marketing message. Also, that many researches have demonstrated that a customer tells fewer people about a product or service he/she likes but spread to a lot more people than the products or services that he/she did not like. So, marketers like to use and take advantage of this natural human behavior in order to generate more buzz for their brands. Still, there are more specific strategies and guidelines for marketers to follow: “Gives away products or services, provides for effortless transfer to others, scales easily from small to very large, exploits common motivations and behaviors, utilizes existing communication networks, and takes advantage of others’ resources”. For example, marketers usually give away their new products for free as the samples in order to attract more customers to visit and further learn more about other product lines. To the real world, there are some remarkable examples of viral marketing campaigns of all time. One of the most famous video is from Nike, and it successfully attracts more than 23.5 million people to watch it. Click here to see the top ten viral marketing campaign of all time! However, some researches have thought that viral marketing is effective due to an aspect of emotional engagement which describes the information recipients have a strong emotional connection with the specific message. So, researchers have listed the six primary emotions with a strong influence on viral referral behavior which are “Surprise, joy, sadness, anger fear, and disgust”. It’s interested to see disgust can be a type of viral marketing.

Virtual World Marketing

The concept of virtual world is to provide computer-based simulated environment for its users, which they can inhabit and interact through avatars. These avatars are usually depicted as three-dimensional graphical representations. Moreover, virtual worlds allow interaction for multiple users. Virtual world seems to be a new and fast growing type of marketing tool at least from the companies’ point of view. Even though Second-life have attracted some of the world’s most prestigious corporations and brands, companies like “Sears, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Coca Cola, Reebok, Coldwell Banker, and Calvin Klein have so far failed to attract even 500 weekly visitors each, some of them far less.” By providing computer-based simulated environment for its users, they can inhabit and interact through avatars. These avatars are usually depicted as three-dimensional graphical representations. However, there are some success companies like Barbie Girls. They allows users to customize their Barbie dolls by dress them up, create virtual homes, and adopt pets and chat with other users. They have hit the “3million user mark in its first 60 days and is growing at the rate of 50,000 new users a day,” according to a report from the Scientific American. Virtual world will not be success once you build it, so to attract the public, some virtual world marketing tactics can be helpful for marketers’ reference. For the tactics, marketers have to get involved in the community, constantly update the virtual world’s contents, and apply the real world’s lessons to the virtual world. Once the marketers have applied these tactics, results of the virtual world have to be measured in order to evaluate and improve the work. Measurement can be based on traffic, time spent, interaction, relative expense and revenues. Click here for more details. Overall, the marketers have to provide visitors with compelling content or entertainment value in order to be successful in the virtual markets.

Word of Mouth

Once get into the web developing stage, information can be acquired by outsourcing through service providers. However, word of mouth is probably the best way to get information, and it is also an effective tool to spread news in order to create buzz. Basically, word of mouth is a method of transporting information by verbal means by informal, person-to-person manner. Word of mouth can be defined as a way that typically considered a face-to-face spoken communication, although phone conversations, blog posts, instant messages or emails. Marketers like to use word of mouth to create buzz in order to promote their products and services though buzz, which called buzz marketing. Word of mouth marketing encompasses many marketing techniques that help and encourage people to talk to each other about certain products and services. Other than buzz marketing, viral Marketing is also another major word of mouth marketing technique which “creating entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion, often electronically or by email.” This link has more types of word of mouth techniques. So, more marketers have awarded that consumers are looking for advice from friends, family and even strangers to make purchase decisions, restaurants information, or even travel information. “For as long as humans have been talking, information has spread by word-of-mouth. But it is only recently that word-of-mouth has become an actual marketing discipline,” says Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer Senior Analyst and the author of the new report. “By eMarketer’s latest estimates, over 25 million US adults regularly share advice on products or services online.” This marketing research indicates that consumers consider word of mouth more than nearly any other kind of marketing strategies. It also shows that the more companies try to control it, the greater the risk of failure. One of the main advantages of word of mouth marketing is that the information is stronger especially; it is coming from someone you trust. The reasons are that “you are able to judge their opinions in the context of what you know about them, and you also know that they don’t have ulterior motives, and that they aren’t trying to “sell you” anything.”

Google Analytics™

Google analytics has become more popular since Google introduced it. Even though the Click track program has existed in the market some people may find Google analytics is easier to use. Google analytics is a free service which would help marketers record large amount of detailed statistics about the visitors to their website. Moreover, Google analytics can track visitors from all different categories of referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing. So, overall the research shows the growth of the Google analytics usage has increased significantly during these years. Google analytics has been introduced by Google for few years, however, it is so popular that hundreds of top web sites in the world are actually using it for their own marketing research. “We put the Alexa global top 500 websites under the microscope and found that 161 out of these 500 websites are using Google Analytics, which is 32.2%. Google Analytics was released in November 2005, but the initial storm of signups forced Google to restrict signups until August of 2006, when the service was made generally available.” So, it’s amazing to see that Google analytics has acquired so much market share in just a short period of time. Other than its performance, Google analytics has also cooperated together with WordPress. Blog users can track their site performances with Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides the tools which help the webmasters and the marketers to determine which ads are performing well, and which are not, also to find more detail information of the visitors. This link will show the steps of setting up the Google analytics to your WordPress. Many Google analytics users are only familiar with the general functions of the program, but there are also few features that are not so obvious. They are “capture internal search stats, fulter out domains, track document downloads or specific links, export to excel, and filter yourself out.” So, these tricks will certainly be helpful for managing websites once the users master them.